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JAZZ IN POLAND:
DePaul University Art Gallery Beethoven was criticized when his Ninth Symphony was first performed. In its final movement, the composer had set music for orchestra and chorus to Schiller's "Ode to Joy." Choral music to a text -- prosaic in form, naive in impulse -- in a grand symphony... it all just seemed to undercut pure music. Some concert-goers even today think the Ninth's last movement a related, but somehow separate work. Still, no one confuses it with a jingle. Like music, visual art has creative flex: it stands alone; collaborates with other arts; at times serves purposes alien to itself. Earlier, posters have often been dismissed; relegated to this latter category. A vibrant, artistic synthesis of disparate intents often seems impossible until someone, to our great surprise, achieves it. "Jazz In Poland: Polish Music Posters from the Rosenberg Collection" is at the DePaul University Art Gallery, Chicago, from July 12 through September 8, 2002 -- twenty Jazz Posters by Polish artists, on loan from the collection of Martin and Patricia Rosenberg. (They are supplemented by two film posters from the DePaul University Art collections: items from previous Rosenberg donations to the university.) In this exhibition, a visitor meets focused visual wit, a graphic deftness of hand; and comes to a few fundamental questions about how and why such work stands as art. Jazz BWA Olsztyn: Posters from the Collection of Piotr Dabrowski (1994) was executed by Roman Kalarus (born 1951). This image showcases some of the traits which have made the Polish Post-WWII poster innovative and significant. By 1994, these posters had achieved international acclaim, and Kalarus's piece announces the exhibition of a noted collection. In Jazz BWA Olsztyn..., a calligraphic "Jazz" seems a wisp of smoke, the tracing of a melodic phrase which ends in a fading tremolo: the word's final double Z. This brushstroke passes in one ear and out the other of a black, devilish, and feline femme fatale. Its path glows within her eyes, while her cat tail snakes its way out of the saxophone she plays. In this image, colors -- glowing blue, black, and ochre -- are as striking as Kalarus's terseness of composition: a lone figure and little else. Jazz BWA Olsztyn... is a lifetime of jazz moods, club nights, covert anecdotes -- encounters and fantasies -- condensed into a single alluring feline. It catches the eye. A passerby is drawn to look for specific details of the show being promoted. Unobtrusively, in a kindred hand lettering, are the What, Where, and When. This piece fulfills its purpose, but its art dominates uncompromised. It sums a musical genre, that genre's associations, and offers information. It doesn't hawk or peddle -- it intrigues and seduces.
After World War II, Polish poster art underwent several major waves, although unique individuals and groups also added variety. Until the late 1950s, remnants of conventional studio approaches -- commercial 'menu' formats and by then formulaic imagery: the 'how-it's-done' of designers -- did linger on. But many designers, and artists, had died in the war. A government, imposed, unpopular, and which knew the power of images, recruited everyone it could. Modernist Art trends set roots in poster art. By 1955, a newer generation of painters, and some individuals trained as architects, were introducing collage, abstractionism, surrealism, even folk tradition, into poster art. The early 1960s saw artists from Warsaw's Academy of Fine Arts lead a reaction to painterly posters, but new trends from abroad -- Pop Art and Neo-Secession -- threatened to overwhelm poster art with comic-book style, photography, or a parasitic 'citation' of easy images. (These oppositions remain a major debate of contemporary art, even now.) Much of the early ferment centered in Warsaw. By the late 1960s, a "new figuralism" emerged from Wroclaw artists: the first real challenge to Warsaw's dominance. By 1989, American formulae nonetheless began to inundate Polish poster art. The 'Polish poster' was a relatively short-lived, but highly fertile phenomenon. Jerzy Swarzynski was born in 1924, and his 11 Festiwal Muzyki Jazzowej (11th Festival of Jazz Music) (1957) is clearly Modernist. In this lithograph, a Calder-esque mobile of curved lines and free-form contours bends and twists like a sound track graphed from an oscilloscope. Swarzynski's two-dimensional construct traces the moving hand as it draws, traces it in red, yellow, and grey on mat black. This is sound -- music -- made sight. This concise, graceful use of line counterbalances a caption at left: "Sopot 14 VII-21 VII." (Sopot is the North coast city in Poland where the event was held.) Waldemar Swierzy (born 1931) is regarded as a master of this art form, and is represented by several posters at the DePaul exhibition. His work would easily deserve a place in any museum of modern art. Jazz '64 Warszawa (Warsaw:1964) arranges six rows of ink-stamped squares printed in ochres, yellows, and browns, on black background. This composition recalls the Merz-Kollage of Kurt Schwitters ("Merz" was a nonsense word Schwitters coined, in Dadaist fashion, to mean "Freedom."). The caption at bottom -- "Jazz '64" -- punctuates an otherwise purely visual composition. Among the varied generational waves, the new aesthetic visions, some artists developed a consistent, personal approach. Restless others jumped through distinct periods of change and evolution. Waldemar Swierzy, exploring a range of modern visual vocabularies, assimilated each to his own intents. A poster such as Billie Holiday (n.d.) in his "Jazz Greats" series parallels the art of Lee Krasner, or Julian Schnabel's charged, fractured and mosaic images of the late Eighties. Swierzy's pastel technique, blurred and in parallel strokes, in Charlie Parker (1985), captures musical reflex, a logic of timing, and a nostalgia for this jazz great, much admired in Poland. This effect is particularly strong in the hazy visual echoing of the musician's fingers on the instrument's valves. While images such this recall a bit of British artist, Francis Bacon, Swierzy's homage expresses a diametrically opposed spirit: Swierzy does not analyze and 'deconstruct'; here, one artist admires and salutes another's excellence.
Up until a few short years before its collapse, the Soviet Union had banned jazz -- as a dangerously seductive Capitalist decadence. Indeed, jazz was contraband in most of the Socialist Bloc. The far more humane, so-called "Polish Road to Socialism" made a place for a jazz obligato. (The earliest jazz poster in this exhibit is from 1957: Jerzy Swarzynski's 11th [!] Festival of Jazz Music.) A guest concert by Stan Getz in Warsaw would draw stadium-size crowds. Such response was not unusual. Jazz flourished in small clubs, student circles, and, ultimately, with official sanction. Jazz offered rebellion; a release, a freedom often elsewhere enjoyed only in Polish graphic art. Lech Majewski's poster, International Meeting of Jazz Vocalists (1997), exemplifies that spirit. Majewski's technique is a collage of torn and cut paper. (The resulting poster is photo-offset.) Here, in lower mid-image, a dog gleefully jumps at a jazz moon which flees out of the picture at upper left. The moon itself, however, is an orb fashioned from reversed lettering, a mirror-image which spells 'Jazz.' At upper left, Majewski's lettering, hand-cut and irregular, matches the poster's direct visual wit. One finds applied Matisse, with a touch of dog a la The New Yorker's own George Booth. These posters tell much about public perception and reception of jazz in Poland. That emerges beyond the events and their appearance in art. How often does female sensuality -- woman as siren -- appear in this jazz art? Robert Knuth (born 1952) is represented by Jazz Jantar: Nadbaltyckie Spotkania Jazzowe (Jazz Semi-precious Amber: Baltic Jazz Encounter) (1974). In Jazz Jantar... a coy woman cuddles within the flare of a musical horn; its surface decorated with stylized hearts. Although this is a photomechanical printing, Knuth used a free watercolor technique toward a whimsical, innocent suggestiveness -- the primal allures of jazz. Roman Kalarus's Jazz BWA Olsztyn played with sly seduction, but his earlier Rawa Blues (1988) presents a dark, dangerously animal scenario. Here, Black man embraces White woman; plays her body like a cello; or, perhaps, the instrument is merely fantasized as such by his passion for jazz. He tongues her mouth; or is it merely the instrument's head? She -- or the cello, as a human fantasy -- reveals two pairs of hands idling below her waist. The artist's choice of grey for one pair of female hands, and black linework for a second duo, implies a repetitive act. In Rawa Blues, the ragged, nervous script aligns from lower left to upper right, adding a sense of oblique, precarious gravity. At mid right, a miniature guitar-like symbol is reduced and altered to a phallic contour. The caption's lettering is nibbled, batwing-like: a rough, even raw calligraphy. This is an aesthetic akin to that of British artists such as Ralph Steadman or Ronald Serle.
Rarely are Polish posters static; not in actual sight, nor in their concept. If the woman-cello of Kalarus's Rawa Blues signals an act, then XVIII Miedzynarodowy Konkurs Jazzu Tradycyjniego (Old Jazz Meeting) (1984) uses an even more fundamental sequencing to examine and recreate a moment of liveliness and joy. At image left, a listener's hand is about to snap its fingers. At the right, that same isolated hand has clearly done the snap. 'Before and after' stand beside themselves. Above this reflex in images, a 'starburst,' a result, a cartoon device, encloses the words "Zlota Tarka 84" ("Golden Rasp '84"). This work is attributed to 'Kuznicki & Sachno & Koch [?].' Symbolism, surrealism, visual metaphor have always been strong currents in Polish art, but these came to the fore, in force, with the Seventies. Jan Sawka's 19th International Festival: Jazz, Rock, Piano, Song (1992) is a semaphoric rebus: object points to word. In a colorful watercolor technique, Sawka neatly orders four symbols for the festival in a vertical progression: painted lips for Song (at bottom); an ivory keyboard for Piano; then (explicitly labeled with a pointer) a rock for Rock music; and finally, at top, a bell-shaped instrument case represents Jazz. The artist underscores the gap between image and meaning with 'photo corners' in all but the poster's upper left. Often in Sawka's art (as with the American artist Saul Steinberg) semantic and philosophical concepts are wordlessly made immediate through what is seen. Seeing this poster, it is brought home that neither word nor image convey actual experience. The artist finds direct ways of representing music, but a viewer has to attend to experience the real event. Jan Sawka was born in 1946, and as part of the Wroclaw Four -- Jan Jaromir Aleksiun, Jerzy Czerniawski, Eugeniusz Get Stankiweicz, and Sawka himself -- he promoted a "new figuralism," a reaction to Warsaw's dominance in art. The artists sought "personal expression and manual gesture," allusion, irony, visual paradox, graphic provocation. Image had to be more than image. Sawka's Jazz Nad Odra (Jazz on the Oder River) (1978) also appears in the Rosenberg collection's display. Here, against a deep black background, a blue suit and hat rests in a chair and contemplates a trumpet on the floor. Presumably the outfit holds an unseen presence: it sits full, hat floating a head-length above collar. The trumpet stands as a vase filled with flowers. A gallery visitor saw it as a mind anticipating a musical offering. Another viewer felt that, until the performance begins, the artist isn't really 'present' ... the horn might as well be a flower vase. 'Merely a poster' -- but it sparked as much philosophical debate among viewers as a painting by Magritte. . Rafal Olbinski was born in 1945 in Kielce, Poland. He has become extremely popular in the U.S.. Jazz Jamboree '79 is one of several Olbinski posters now at the DePaul University Art Gallery and it exemplifies much of this artist's work. A Black musician stands at right; at left, a White musician faces him. Both musicians blow into a single Gordian Knot of trumpet valves. Whether surreal partnership, or a competition in a draw, the image stops a passer-by, begs his interpretation: A memorable symbol which earmarks the promoted event for memory. International Jazz Pianists Festival (1981) presents the viewer with a grand piano used as an indoor garden. Beneath its open lid, a dense growth of flowers bloom, while five colorful birds fly out of this keyboard planter. An overall impression harkens to Henri Rousseau. Olbinski's composition is detailed, but nonetheless coherent; decorative without being simplistic. As with all good design, it seizes attention, but, succinctly and directly, states its purpose -- where and when its event will be: "Kalisz '81." (Kalisz is a Polish city.)
Mariusz Palka's poster, 1st International Competition in Jazz Improvisation (1986), was done for the Academy of Music in Katowice. Two saxophone soloists (image right), orange and red in complexion, blow their instruments. The background is a dominant blue. (This work is reproduced in the gallery's brochure.) Palka's poster demonstrates how quickly even a reduced figuration, a surreal caricature, sparks recognition. The artist's own individual manipulation adds an interpretative novelty. Palka was born in 1952. Lech Majewski's International Jazz Vocalists, Zamosc (1989) represents a further, more Modernist distillation of visual logic. Here, a stylized mouth in full song is centered within a light orange trapezoid sparsely adorned with abstract motifs. The recognizable mouth itself transforms geometric shape into a singer's head. Lest that clue not be at once recognized, this head is set upon a photographic hand and shoulders. Music may be fleeting and elusive, but it is born out of real flesh and blood. In the 1960s, an influx of Pop art formulae seemed ready to overpower Polish poster art. New and indigenous directions soon asserted themselves. Roslaw Szaybo's Miles Davis (1989) echoes some of the 1960s 'psychedelic' fashions. Szaybo's poster portrays the face of the famed jazz musician in frontal close-up on black background. From Davis's mouth, and veering to the right, is a multi-colored, synaesthetic stream of sound interpreted as colors. The Rosenberg exhibition includes 40th Anniversary Jamboree (1998) by an unknown artist. That very fact may be significant. This poster moves closer to the conventions of American and much contemporary West European commercial work. There is a designer's concept and composition -- a face is eclipsed above the eyes by a burst of cited, collaged images, a pastiche, really, of musical instruments and paper bits. A brain explodes with jazz? The medium however is printed photographic bits. The threat of assembly line art, a parasitic art, with a simple ad studio pitch, has raised heated discussion and concern in many art circles, Polish and foreign. It is ironic that a Marxist system which mistrusted and feared individuality and personality fostered a highly individual art, one which shattered conventions; while democratic traditions have increasingly nurtured a homogenized and conformist graphic milieu. (Among some modern art groups there has even been an effort to eliminate the artist's presence from his art.) Photocollage depends upon an artist's intent. In itself, it is only an approach, not a guarantee of merit. This poster is not bad. It is still above the norm at present. But it does not have the charm of Kalarus's Jazz BWA Olsztyn:, nor the disturbing edge of that artist's Rawa Blues. It has its place in this exhibition: as a vantage from which to judge its companions; as a point for discussion and debate; as evidence that the Polish poster ranged all options. Some composer once remarked that it is easier to set minor verse to song than a very fine poem. The power of words often thwarts an excellence in music or the visual. Posters must, by their very rationale, impart text as well as something seen. Polish posters have achieved striking results through lettering and type. If a film maker alternates black and white sequences with color images, neither will have the same effect as the single medium or its alternative. Each choice sets its own context. Conversely, if after miming a narrative, a mime unexpectedly speaks, the words will have a different impact than if they were read in a body of prose, or spoken as part of a running monologue. Lettering and type are a forte in many Polish posters. In some, as in Kalarus's Jazz BWA Olsztyn... or his Rawa Blues, a calligraphic lettering is as much a part of the visual whole as any image element. In others, such as in Waldemar Swierzy's Jazz '64 Warszawa or the anonymous Jan Garbarek Group, a select type is used as a strong visual punctuation: its contrast as a visual part acts much like a spoken phrase after the mime's performance. The effect is strategic. The Jan Garbarek Group (n.d.), reproduced in the gallery's brochure, typifies this latter approach. Roslaw Szaybo's poster for the ZSP (Zrzeszenie Studentow Polskich, or Union of Polish Students, Warsaw) (1962), is a purely typographic poster: an excited, vibrating mass of the word "Jazz" in multiples. Szaybo places the time and place at the bottom as an anchor for the whole. Szaybo was born in 1933, but here he has brought Futurist and Constructivist art legacies into a contemporary sensibility. Whatever the artist's technique in the finished art, all the posters on display (with the exception of Jerzy Swarzynski's lithograph) are photomechanicals. This work was meant to go to the streets, to be hung on kiosks, walls, billboards. It announced cultural events and commemorated jazz. Mark Pohlad (DePaul University Art Department) commented in a panel discussion for this showing that: "As a poster artist, you don't have the problem of getting a painting accepted by a jury or into a salon or hoping the government might buy it. Posters simply go into the community and find their own footing." Posters stand before the ultimate jury. The art in this exhibition has passed its tests. "Jazz In Poland..." is a visual pleasure; a snapshot of musical history; a fine sampling and an education in quality applied art. It has a further value for the visitor. Steven Heller, senior art director of The New York Times Book Review has noted that around 1970, The New York Times turned to Polish posters and drew heavily for new visual vocabularies: "cerebral, symbolic, metaphoric...." They sought a surrealism and fantasy to apply as "a means to comment on political and social issues without being literal -- and without hitting the audience over the head." Heller, also editor of the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, concluded:
"Jazz In Poland: Polish Music Posters from the Rosenberg Collection" is at the DePaul University Art Gallery, Chicago, from July 12 through September 8, 2002. A three-fold color brochure for this exhibition is available at the DePaul University Art Gallery. It includes an informative discussion of the Polish poster by DePaul faculty: James Krokar from the History Department, Mark Pohlad from Art History, and Dolores Wilber from Graphic Design. --G. Jurek Polanski Jurek Polanski has previously written or art edited for American Spectator, Anonym, Artful Dodge, Nit&Wit:Chicago's Art Magazine, Strong Coffee, and numerous others. Graphic artist and designer, he's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek Polanski is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net. Editorial Note: Books mentioned in www.artscope.net reviews may be purchased through this site's amazon.com link. One of the best sources for the Polish poster is Krzysztof Dydo's Masters of Polish Poster Art (Mistrzowie Polskiej Sztuki Plakatu) (Bielsko-Biala:Buffi:1995), a 239-page, well-illustrated reference in Polish, English, and German. Steven Heller is quoted from this book. Also useful is Polish Contemporary Graphic Art (in English) by Danuta Wroblewska (Warsaw, Interpress:1998). A general overview of Polish poster art may also be found in www.artscope.net's review "American Films in Polish Posters" (April:2002). |
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